OCT 2015
WHERE TO GO
BEST COFFEE BARS IN THE U.S.
TOAST
The Next Big Thing?
FALL TABLE SETTINGS
How to set the perfect spread.
CONTENTS
OCT 2015
FEATURES
2 Where to Go Next: Best U.S. Coffee Bars
4 Toast?: The Next Big Thing
17 Fall Table Settings: How to set the perfect spread
ARTICLES
9 Fall Super Foods: The best foods to eat for the season.
15 Chef Martin Stone: The
rising star of the restaurant world.
23 The Latest Food Trends:
From the cronut to artisan toast; what’s next?
29 Top Mixers: Find the perfect mixer for this baking season.
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31 Best of Baking: Find
the best of fall for baking.
RECIPES 27 Cinnamin Banana Bread 28 S’more Pancakes 32 Pumpkin Spice Butter 34 Homemade Bagels 36 B arbeque Slow Cooker Chicken Tacos
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39 Pumpkin Squash Ravioli 43 Grandma’s Cannoli
WHERE TO GO NEXT: BEST U.S. COFFEE BARS Food insiders are as excited to talk about coffee bars as they are restaurants: The quality has gotten that good. Here, the classic and new places around the country with the most fanatical devotees.
OLD GUARD JOE THE ART OF COFFEE
Jonathan Rubinstein was one of the originals on the New York City coffee scene when he opened his first café in 2003 with a luxe La Marzocco espresso machine, carefully sourced beans and expertly trained baristas. Since then, he has expanded beyond the first Waverly Place spot with three more, including one in Grand Central Terminal. All occasionally sell batches of cupcakes hand-baked by comedian Amy Sedaris. New York City
GIMME! COFFEE
Since its start eight years ago in the college town of Ithaca, New York, Gimme! Coffee has grown to include six coffee bars across the state. The Lansing location is in a ’40s gas station on the Cayuga wine trail; the newest branch is on Manhattan’s Mott Street. In addition to the “Leftist” house espresso, a blend of beans from Indonesia, India and South America,
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FEATURE | Where to Go Next
Gimme! makes drip coffee using a rotating selection of locally roasted beans, also available by the pound. Ithaca, NY
BLUE BOTTLE CAFÉ
At Blue Bottle Coffee Company’s new spot just off Mint Plaza, owner James Freeman brews coffee with a custom-siphon system using freshly roasted beans—his claim to fame for the past six years. The café also serves simple food, such as perfectly poached eggs on toast. San Francisco
STUMPTOWN COFFEE ROASTERS
Since it opened in 1999, Stumptown’s espresso has become the gold standard, thanks to owner Duane Sorenson. This winter, he’ll expand to an eighth location in Manhattan—but it just wouldn’t be Stumptown without locally roasted beans, so he’s establishing a facility in Brooklyn. Portland, OR
LAMILL COFFEE BOUTIQUE
Owner Craig Min, who has been selling beans wholesale since 1997, has a serene new café in Silver Lake with over-the-top waiter service: A
barista heats water at the table, then mixes it with ground coffee using two glass globes. The menu, created by chef Michael Cimarusti of Providence restaurant, includes a quirky Asian BLT with pork belly, arugula and black bean sauce. Los Angeles
INTELLIGENTSIA COFFEE & TEA
Low-key Intelligentsia is one of the most respected coffee roasters in the country. Coffee buyer Geoff Watts, a pioneer in the direct-trade coffee movement when Intelligentsia launched in 1995, was among the first to seek individual growers, cutting out middlemen. Intelligentsia now has four outposts; the newest is in Los Angeles. Chicago
NEW STARS BLOC 11 CAFE
Housed in an old bank, the year-old Bloc 11 has flawless espresso, brewed with a lime-green La Marzocco machine, and delicious sandwiches, like
the Safe Haven with artichoke hearts and goat cheese. The former vaults are now seating areas. Somerville, MA
ABRAÇO
The line can stretch out the door at this new, practically postage stamp–size East Village café, where charismatic partner Jamie McCormick greets almost everyone by name, and brews coffee straight into each mug. Chef and partner Elizabeth Quijada makes an excellent rustic pain perdu—a thick slice of custardy toast folded around ricotta. New York City
3CUPS: WINE, COFFEE, TEA MERCHANTS
The 3Cups philosophy that everything it sells should be easily replicated at home means no fancy espresso drinks at this three-year-old café, due to reopen in a larger space in October. Instead, the focus is on simple drip and French press coffee made with some of the finest single-origin beans from nearby Counter Culture Coffee. The café also sells great tea and biodynamic wine. Chapel Hill, NC
COFFEE SLINGERS
Melody Harwell brought serious
coffee to Oklahoma City when she opened Coffee Slingers in a renovated car dealership in March. She’s such a stickler for quality that she insists all of the cappuccinos be served exactly the same way, in seven-ounce ceramic mugs, and she’ll only make coffee with a French press using single-origin beans. Oklahoma City Written by Mary Han
Toast: The next big thing? Written by John Gravois
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ll the guy was doing was slicing inchthick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare — blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as I waited in line at an unfamiliar café — was the way he did it. He had the solemn intensity of a Ping-Pong player who keeps his game very close to the table: knees slightly bent, wrist flicking the butter knife back and forth, eyes suggesting a kind of flow state. The coffee shop, called the Red Door, was a spare little operation in downtown San Francisco. There were just three employees working behind the counter: one making coffee, one taking orders, and the soulful guy making toast. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves — the boxy Wonder Bread shape, like a train car, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked. And on the brief menu, toast was a stand-alone item — at $3 per slice. It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. So I ordered some. It was pretty good. It tasted just like toast, but better. A couple of weeks later I was at a place called Acre Coffee in Petaluma, north of San Francisco. Half of the shop’s food
menu fell under the heading “Toast Bar.” Not long after that I went to The Mill, a big, light-filled café and bakery in the city. A small chalkboard listed the day’s toast menu. Everywhere the offerings were more or less the same: thick slices of good bread, square-shaped, topped with things like small-batch almond butter or apricot marmalade or sea salt. Back at the Red Door one day, I asked the manager what was going on. Why all the toast? “Tip of the hipster spear,” he said. news site called VentureBeat. For a few weeks $4 toast I had two reactions to this: became a rallying cry in the First, of course, I rolled my city’s media — an instant eyes. How silly; how twee; parable and parody of the how perfectly San Francisshallow, expensive new San co, this toast. And second, Francisco. despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. How The butt of all this criticism many weeks would it be, I appeared to be The Mill, wondered, before artisanal which also supplies the Red toast made it to Brooklyn, Door with its bread. So I or Chicago, or Los Angeles? assumed I had found the craHow long before an artidle of the toast phenomenon. cle appears in Slate telling I was wrong. When I called people all across America that they’re making toast all Josey Baker, the — yes — wrong? How long before the baker behind The Mill’s backlash sets in? For whatev- toast, he was a little mystified er reason, I felt compelled to by the dustup over his prodgo looking for the origins of uct while also a bit taken aback at how popular it had the fancy toast trend. become. “On a busy Saturday If the discoveryof artisanal or Sunday we’ll make 350 to toast had made me roll my 400 pieces of toast,” he told eyes, it soon made other peo- me. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” ple in San Francisco downBut Baker assured me that right indignant. I spent the he was not the Chuck Berry early part of my search following the footsteps of a very of fancy toast. He was its Elvis: He had merely caught low-stakes mob. “$4 Toast: the trend on its upswing. Why the Tech Industry Is Ruining San Francisco” ran The place I was looking for, he and others told me, was a the headline of an August article on a local technology coffee shop in the city’s Out-
er Sunset neighborhood — a little spot called Trouble. The Trouble Coffee & Coconut Club is a tiny storefront next door to a Spanish-immersion preschool, about three blocks from the Pacific Ocean in one of the city’s windiest, foggiest, farthest-flung areas. As places of business go, I would call Trouble impressively odd. Instead of a standard café patio, Trouble’s outdoor seating area is dominated by a substantial section of a tree trunk, stripped of its bark, lying on its side. The shop itself is about the size of a single-car garage, with an L-shaped bar made of driftwood. And a glass refrigerator case beneath the cash register prominently displays a bunch of coconuts and grapefruit. Next to the cash register is a single steel toaster.Trouble’s specialty is a thick slice of locally made white toast, generously covered with butter, cinnamon, and sugar: a variation on the cinnamon toast that every-
one’s mom, including mine, seemed to make when I was a kid in the 1980s. The menu also features a go-for-broke option called “Build Your Own Damn House,” which consists of a coffee, a coconut, and a piece of cinnamon toast. Hanging in the door is a manifesto that covers a green chalkboard. “We are local people with useful skills in tangible situations,” it says, among other things. “Drink a cup of Trouble. Eat a coconut. And learn to build your own damn house.”
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